


Eyes Still Black

by veausy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Always Female Dean, Crossroads Deals & Demons, Crossroads Demon Dean, Demon Deals, Demon Dean Winchester, F/M, Freeform, Genderswap, Incest, Sibling Incest, Soulless Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 03:19:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11614785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veausy/pseuds/veausy
Summary: Dean never had a soul, not really.





	Eyes Still Black

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Soulless](https://archiveofourown.org/works/986503) by [ice_hot_13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_hot_13/pseuds/ice_hot_13). 



> On a whim, total freeform, not betad.

Dean never had a soul, not really. When she was still in the womb, she was diagnosed with a fetal disorder and given weeks to live, if she ever made it to term.

The demon who met Mary at the crossroads was an old woman with kind eyes. She asked, “Will you still want this when the deal is made?”

In the end, Mary got five years to live and Dean would not have a soul until her tenth birthday, but the disorder did not show up on any more ultrasounds. She was born fat and happy and screaming, with eyes that were pitch black.

\--

Mary died five years to the day after she made the deal, six months after Sam was born. She put him to bed first, coaxed Dean to come say good night to her brother, and then ended up singing _Hey Jude_ over their heads after Dean climbed into the crib and wrapped herself around the baby.

In the middle of the night, while John was sleeping, she walked barefoot to the nearest crossroads to meet her fate.

John drank himself to sleep until Christmas, and Dean and Sam spent most of the next year with Uncle Bobby. Dean later thought it probably wasn’t just grief that kept John away, it must also have been fear of her bottomless black eyes and rage at her very existence. Dean was being punished. Sam was just a casualty.

By her seventh birthday, Dean had only seen her father four times after that November night.

\--

Kids at school stared, pointed, scattered. Dean grew a tough outer shell, reinforced by Bobby’s gruffly supportive upbringing and the blind devotion Sam seemed to bleed from each pore, from the day he learned to walk for the first time and chose to beeline straight for her. Every night before bed, his chubby little hands would reach up to her face and touch her eyes, and he would fall asleep staring into them like he was staring at the sky. Dean felt clean, celestial.

Dean was allowed to play sports, though most parents took their kids out of the teams in response. None of the kids asked much about her demonhood, but the prejudiced fear seemed to dissipate the longer that they knew her, giving way to a low-level discomfort.

Maybe her temperament would have been different, if she’d had a soul. Maybe she’d be more aggressive and impassioned, like Sam, setting goals and climbing mountains to reach them. But Dean felt mostly bored, two parts uninterested and one part waiting for her tenth birthday so she could finally be a real person.

\--

Every few days after she turned nine, Dean was summoned to various crossroads around town. She faced so many hundreds of people that they ended up blending together in a deep, dark hole of weeping widows, raging businessmen, alcoholics, and a fair few like Mary.

Most just wanted money and fame and prosperity, which was usually worth something as small as a much-desired promotion or a few years off their lives. A few wanted to bring back loved ones from the dead, which cost them a lot more. A rare handful ended up dying immediately after the deal was made, because their trade was too precious. Dean couldn’t sleep after those, and spent hours in the upstairs bathroom retching, with Sam sitting quietly on the other side of the door and bitchfacing his upset at her misery.

He didn’t understand why anyone would make such stupid deals, and it offended him that they made Dean privy to it.

Eventually Bobby gave Dean a handgun to carry with her at all times, in case anyone was too overcome with despair or greed. Dean only had to use it once, a month before her tenth birthday. She started counting down the days with renewed fervor.

\--

On the first day of 1989, John came to collect her and Sam for a Shtriga hunt. They were left in a motel at the edge of some town in North Dakota, with one box each of Lucky Charms and Spaghetti-Os to hold them over for three days.

On the third day, Sam was attacked while Dean was out looking for a vending machine after food ran out. By the time she came back, Sam was pale and cold, and even shooting the Shtriga dead didn’t help. She called John’s cell twice and waited for an hour before sprinting to the crossroads four blocks away.

The demon that met her was young, his sneer still genuine and his hunger still rabid. “You’re a bit early for collection, kiddo. You’re got three weeks to go.”

“I’m making a deal. Sam’s –“ she choked. When she had locked the motel door behind her, Sam had still not moved. “I want you to bring Sam back. He’s – and I don’t know what to do. Bring him back.”

“That’s not going to come cheap,” the demon cooed. “Do you know your price?”

Dean thought back over the entire previous year of deals she’d made, counted quickly. “Ten years. You make him better, and you take another ten years.”

“Maybe this time I collect from him?” His voice was so sugary now, it made a shiver run up Dean’s spine.

“Absolutely not!” she snarled, feeling her eyes glimmer in the darkness. She wondered what color they would have been in twenty-one days. “Keep mine. Fix him and leave him alone.”

The air seemed to quiver when the demon reached out slowly. His hand wove itself in Dean’s nape and pulled her to him, dragging her to her toes as he planted hot, sour-tasting lips on hers.

When she ran back into the motel room, Sam was pink and breathing heavily, deep in peaceful sleep.

\--

Bobby was not to tell Sam about Dean’s deal, under threat that he would come home to find every car in his yard smashed to pieces and every bottle of alcohol gone.

When February, March, and April came and went without any questions about her still-black eyes, Dean figured Sam was too young to notice anyway.

\--

Over the next few years, Dean met a handful of other demons like her, but none had been soulless from birth. Many still remembered their human lives, though often it was with either disdain or heartache, and Dean was glad she was never given anything to compare to.

Sam grew more curious as he grew older. “Does it hurt, to be teleported like that?”

Dean, stirring two servings of spaghetti on the stove, shrugged one shoulder and reached for the salt. “It doesn’t feel like anything. I’m here one second and there the next.”

“It looks funny,” Sam mused, picking at the label on his glass bottle of coke – a small splurge (of several) that Dean allowed herself because Sam had earned straight As the previous semester. Bobby had bought him a scooter. “’Cause they don’t even let you, like, prepare for being summoned or anything. You’re ranting to me about Kansas’s greatest hits and then – poof! – the car is empty and I have to grab the wheel so we don’t crash into a lamppost.”

Dean felt her shoulders tense. “I can’t help it. You know I don’t want the car totaled.” The idea that her existence put Sam in constant danger like that made her heat up, made her restless. She had no control over anything, and it was her fault that she was still a demon in the first place. Leaving Sam alone the night of the Shtriga still kept her sleepless, years after the deal.

“Duh,” Sam scoffed. “I just think it’s unfair. You should get some say in if you go or not. It’s almost like you’re a slave.”

“Sammy,” Dean sighed. “I _am_ a slave.”

\--

When she was nineteen, Dean was summoned by a suicidal girl named Devonny. She had been traumatized in childhood, addicted to prescription pills, recently raped, and devastated by multiple events that had unfolded after; she wanted Dean to take her life. 

Dean frowned. “In exchange for what?” So little of her was affected by the scene, and it was unclear if that was a demonic quality or if she was just a bad person. She saw these oceans of emotion at every crossroads, deep love or deep despair, always stronger than the desire to keep what was given away. But she felt none of it herself. Mostly, she was just irritated to be torn from the couch in Bobby’s living room, where Sam had just been sprawled over her as they read a book on Saturn’s moons and stared with wonder at the map of the constellations on its back cover.

“Anything! Take anything, please, I can’t do it anymore, please, please –“

Dean crossed her arms. After a pause, she realized there was no way to soften her next words. “You have nothing I want.”

The girl sniffled and looked up, surprised. Her wispy brown hair fell into her shadowed eyes, and her tears left her whole face shiny and wet. “How can –? What about – not my soul?”

Dean shrugged. “Too damaged. You won’t find a single demon who’ll take it, if I’m honest with you.”

Ten minutes later, Dean was walking back to the scrapyard, and Devonny was walking back to where she’d come from. Strangely, hearing that she wasn’t worth a damn to Hell and had no choice but to stay alive had made her content. She’d stood up from the ground with her shoulders straighter, her face smoother. Dean guessed she would live for a long time.

\--

When Sam turned fifteen, he forced Dean and Bobby to come with him to the local DMV, and he insisted on driving Bobby’s truck back to the house with his new permit. At exit 302, he slid off the interstate onto a side road and whooped happily, catching Dean’s eye in the rearview mirror. Two seconds later, a freight truck slammed into them so hard that they were dragged for fifty feet.

Sam was on ventilators for eleven days, and doctors told Dean that with so much brain damage, he was unlikely to wake up.

This time, the demon was a girl her age, with curly blonde hair and a mole above her nose.

With her arm in a sling, her back in a brace, and her leg in a cast, Dean choked out, “Bring him back.”

The demon’s eyes narrowed, studying her. “Don’t you want me to fix you?”

Dean barely looked down at herself. “I’ll heal. Sam won’t. Please.”

“How much are you willing to give?”

Tears liberally streaking down her cheeks and snot clogging up her nose, Dean warbled, “However much you want.”

The demon smiled, not unkindly, and said, “Ten more years.”

When they kissed, Dean’s injuries disappeared, but the price stayed the same.

\--

The official story was that she had the date wrong; it wasn’t her twentieth birthday, but her thirtieth, which would be the harbinger of her soul.

Sam was pissed on her behalf, slamming doors and bitching at everyone with seemingly no consistent catalyst, and on January twenty-fourth, he threw a small crumpled chunk of newspaper at her so hard that it stung her skin. “Happy birthday,” he growled, and stalked out of the house. 

Inside the yellowing Sunday edition of the Argus Leader, Dean found a necklace with a brass amulet.

Later, Sam would stare at it to avoid her eyes as he stumbled over a terrible apology, before lifting the bag at his feet and walking to the bus that would take him to Stanford. Watching him amble away, Dean lifted the necklace from her neck and threw it on the ground, stomping it into the gravel for good measure.

Twenty minutes into the drive home, she swerved back around and spent half an hour on her hands and knees, searching for it in the bleak illumination of the Impala's headlights ten feet away. She never took it off again.

\--

Dean guessed that if she had human eyes, they’d be the color of Sam’s. He was her brother after all, and his were quite pretty. When he was little, Sam would often say his eyes were both of theirs. He used them to see, and Dean looked at them more than anyone else, and it balanced out.

When he was five, terrifyingly, he’d offered to make a deal. “You take one of my eyes and I’ll take one of yours and we can both be demons,” he had said. “And then we’ll be the same!” 

“What would you get in return?”

Sam hadn’t understood the question. “I’d get _your_ eye!” 

“It has to be something you want.”

“Yeah!” Sam had happily said back, and Dean thought if she’d had a heart, she would have felt it breaking.

\--

One month and seven days after Sam left, Dean packed her own bags, gave Bobby a crushing hug, and drove to Stanford, making the 26-hour drive in just under 20.

First, she got a job working weekends at The Dutch Goose in Menlo Park, perfecting her already impressive drink mixing skills. Then, she rented out a one-bedroom nearby with a stack of cash Bobby had snuck into her duffel. A lot of the monthly checks went toward maintaining a beautiful balcony overlooking the water, and it was high enough that most street noise didn’t reach her.

At the end of October, she finally ran into Sam.

She’d been watching him from the day she arrived, noting with a distant panic that both of his roommates were demons; she had wanted to summon them for questioning many times, but chickened out when she realized it would get back to Sam, who wanted nothing to do with her. 

The bar was nearly deserted on a chilly Tuesday night, just her behind the bar and three men sprinkled around the room, staring silently at the game on the TV and nursing their beers.

As she scooped ice into a cup, a hand landed on the bar with a smack, and her eyes hooked on it. Long tan fingers with neat pink nails and one white scar near the middle knuckle from when they’d been sparring and Sam’s fist landed on a nail sticking out of a cheap motel bed frame. Forcing her eyes to fall back to her task, she cleared her throat. “Hey.”

Sam didn’t answer, just pulled out the nearest stool and sat in it, hands steepled as he watched her over them.

Self consciously, Dean lowered her lashes to hide some of the black of her eyes, but refused to speak first.

“I found your apartment,” Sam finally said, voice low and raspy.

The ice went in the blender and the blender ran for thirty seconds, giving Dean time to breathe. She was in the process of making a virgin piña colada, her and Sam’s all-time favorite. John and Bobby had tried to push whiskey and beer on them, but it never stuck. Dean figured being soulless made her less receptive to the drug and more tuned into the flavor of alcoholic drinks, and back then whatever she liked, Sam had liked.

“Did you let yourself in? Have a look at the furniture? Take a piss in the bathroom?”

Sam snorted. “I’ve known since the week you came. Brady and Zach sniffed you out right away.”

“Did you make sure to hand your soul over for such rapid newscasting?”

Sam was silent again, watching her pour coconut cream into the pineapple juice mix. The blender ran for another thirty seconds, and combined with the loud music flowing from the speakers it was almost deafening.

Dean turned and poured a large glass, slamming it in front of Sam. He glanced at it, raised an eyebrow, and pursed his lips. Dean rolled her eyes, reached for a thick pink straw, and stuck it in. Sam started to sip.

\--

Sam moved in with her the summer before his second year and never moved out.

After she made deals and came home, he’d be waiting for her in the kitchen with hard liquor, sometimes mixed in whatever ways he’d picked up from watching her at the bar.

“How many years?” he’d ask each time, eyes sad.

It was never less than five, Dean had noticed. People in this area were fairly affluent, and whatever they were trying to get was usually a heavy burden on their souls. Most days, she was making people fall in love or come back to life, and that was ten years minimum. Sam always listened curiously, inquisitive.

“You ever wonder if they regret it, after?”

Dean nodded, remembering Devonny. “I learned a while back – like, a trick, I guess. Usually if they look totally out of it with grief or whatever, I just say that they have nothing to trade me. They walk away.”

Sam smiled. “That’s good, Dean.” He refilled her glass. “That’s really good.”

\--

One of the many times Dean snuck into Sam’s classes, she sat with him in the back while they waited for the professor to arrive. There were at least a hundred students strewn about the lecture hall, three of whom she recognized from crossroads.

“Would you ever make a deal?” Dean whispered under her breath, pencil doodling car logos in the margins of her notebook.

Sam shrugged. “I used to think so.”

Dean’s eyes snapped to Sam’s, who was steadfastly avoiding her gaze. “For what?" 

“Your soul,” he finally murmured. “But Brady, and then Zach, told me demons are off-limits. Nobody can make trades on your behalf.”

Dean stared. “You tried?”

For a long moment, Sam’s eyes followed the hunchbacked senile professor as he waddled toward the front of the room. His voice was nearly inaudible when he whispered, “Twice.”

\--

In his senior year, Sam bulked up. He stayed friends with the two demons, though Dean had to have serious talks with them about how creatively and in how many ways she would dismember them if a single hair was taken off his head in exchange for _anything_ , and the three of them trekked to the local gym every morning at the ass crack of dawn while Dean was still snoring into her pillow.

By April, he was coming home sweaty and with his shirt off – something he’d never done before, something he’d never had the confidence for before – and Dean wondered if her soul was shuddering somewhere in the ether while she was topside lusting after her brother.

It was always after ten when Dean rolled out of bed, and Sam’s first class was at noon, so she’d stand in the kitchen making him brunch and listening to the shower run, hating herself for who she was and what she felt. 

If she could love, she figured she would love Sam. Perhaps at the exception of everyone else, even. It was just that without a soul, there was nothing stopping that not-love from morphing into whatever it wanted.

She was twenty-six. If she could make it through one day without messing everything up, she could make it through another year. If she could make it through one year, she could make it through four.

So she did.

\--

Dean got permission from her manager to close the bar for a few hours the night after Sam’s graduation, so he could have a party for just his friends and Dean could control his alcohol intake.

An hour in, she spotted Sam and some girl from his Psychology of Mental Illness class as they sipped beers at the bar. Approaching them, she heard the girl ask, “But aren’t you ever scared? I mean, there’s so many reports of them going rogue and having these huge killing sprees.”

Sam laughed. “No, no, she’s not like that.”

“But Sam,” the girl said, hushed, “Deanna’s a demon.”

Sam turned his full attention on the girl. “She is.” His voice sounded warm, content. “And I grew up with her, she’s my sister.”

Rather than deal with it, Dean swerved toward the pool tables and stayed there the whole night.

\--

Sam started working for the District Attorney in Palo Alto the summer after he finished his first year of law school. He was up late nights reading case law, drafting memos, and preparing arguments in case he was asked to show in court, and by July he had six fancy suits in steady rotation that Dean bought with her savings from the bar, where she’d become senior manager.

On July first, he showed up for a hearing thirty minutes early and got shot in the face by a friend of the defendant. He was in an induced coma for less than an hour when Dean showed up at the crossroads.

“I want permanent protection for his life, and I want him to live to be a hundred years old, and I want him in peak condition forever. I mean it: no colds, no flus, no cuts or scrapes.”

The demon’s eyes looked almost red, something ravenous warping his face. “Oh, hon,” he purred, “you’re asking for a whole lot.”

“Take my soul. Keep it. Keep my soul, and Sam is safe forever.” She never had a soul, she couldn’t possibly miss it.

Back at the hospital, the doctor said he’d never seen such a recovery in all his years of practice, but Sam’s vitals were all looking great, and the wound on his face had lost its swelling.

A week later, Sam woke up. 

\--

“You made a deal,” Sam said accusingly, when they climbed out of the car and made their way to Bobby’s house the Friday before classes started again.

Dean looked up at him innocently.

“I know you did. All the doctors and nurses in the _building_ came to look at the boy wonder who survived a fatal shooting and didn’t even have a scar to show for it.” They walked in step for a while, silent. “What did you trade?”

“Having kids,” Dean murmured. “Never gonna be a mom. Thankfully, I never wanted that.”

“Wha – Dean!” Sam whined. “That’s so stupid, why would you do that?”

“Sam, come on, I’m twenty-eight and I haven’t even dated anyone long enough to want a family. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to bring you back.” 

Sam’s mouth, which had been open in preparation to whine some more, abruptly shut. He studied her from under his bangs, making her cheeks flush and her eyes skitter to the front door, where Bobby stood waiting. Mercifully, they didn’t talk about it again. 

\--

The morning after her thirtieth birthday, Sam woke her up by waving a plate of breakfast under her nose, bent eagerly forward to catch her eyes. When he did, his whole face fell. “Your eyes are black.”

Dean sat up, swiping the plate from his grasp and munching on the toast eagerly.

Sam straightened, looking lost. “Why are your eyes still black?”

“Why is your hair still stupid?” Dean retorted.

“Dean,” Sam huffed. He looked tense and small, caved in on himself and scared. Dean reached out, letting her hand grip his shoulder and then slip slowly down to his hand. “You – the coma, you did that? You gave your soul?”

Dean nodded almost imperceptibly, eyes glued to his. She wanted so desperately to know what he was thinking. If she had anything else to give, she’d give it, just to know what Sammy felt and thought and cared about every single moment of his life.

His eyes wet and his lips curved in a frown, he sat there, breathing silently and studying her face. His eyes seemed drawn to the blackness of hers just like they were when he was little, staying glued there without blinking for unending moments. Then, before Dean knew what was happening or had time to move her plate aside, he lurched forward, lips smashing into hers and pushing her down into her pillow until they were both flat on the bed. The eggs smeared on her sheets and the bacon fell under the blanket, and she struggled a little, mind caught on the mess she’d have to clean up.

When she grunted and opened her eyes, Sam’s were looking straight at her, hooded but anticipating.

Letting the plate clatter to the carpet, Dean wrapped both arms right around Sam’s neck and leaned all in, mouth opening and teeth pulling at Sam’s lips with her eyes shut tight.

“You do love me,” Sam whispered against her skin, some time later. “You _love_ me.”

Dean agreed, hearing it from Sam’s mouth. If Sam believed it, she could believe it, too. She didn’t have a soul, but she’d given it away, and she didn’t regret it. Whatever she was, Sam thought it was enough.


End file.
